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I grow weary now, and often at nights, when the vast shadow of the lamp shudders on the ceiling and the wind moans hoarsely outside, I fall back in sheer luxury on the fine, straight, cut-and-thrust of old Boswell's conversations as a relief from the slavering babble which I often hear.
It is needless to add that he was the same personage already introduced in the character of Father Buonaventure, by which name he was distinguished at Fairladies. His dress was not different from what he then wore, excepting that he had a loose riding-coat of camlet, under which he carried an efficient cut-and-thrust sword, instead of his walking rapier, and also a pair of pistols.
In a very short treatise on a cut-and-thrust weapon like the broad-sword, it would be out of place to enter into any speculations as to the probable dates at which the stone, the bronze, and the iron ages commenced their respective epochs.
Now, though I spent much of my watch in thinking over the details of my prodigious weapon, yet it must not be supposed that I neglected to perform my duty as watchman; for I walked continually about the top of the hill, keeping my cut-and-thrust ready for any sudden emergency.
Thus boisterously they bore themselves, but more gravely at the swordsmith's, where we picked out a good cut-and-thrust blade, well balanced, that came readily to my hand.
Tressady threw a quick intelligence into his questions that inevitably recalled to Maxwell the cut-and-thrust of his speech on the preceding evening; nor behind his rapid discussion of a vulgar business did the constrained emotion of his manner escape his companion. At last all was settled. At the last moment an uneasy question rose in Maxwell's mind.
He rules, literally, by divine right, and we shall see that, in the French feudal epics, as in Homer, this claim of divine right is granted, even in the case of an insolent and cowardly Over-Lord. Achilles half draws "his great sword," one of the long, ponderous cut-and-thrust bronze swords of which we have actual examples from Mycenae and elsewhere.
It is easy to understand how his temperament found satisfaction and relaxation at the same time in the cut-and-thrust work of Dumas and Weyman. I ought, perhaps, to add that he explained with a smile how politics did not leave him much time for serious reading just then. They have certainly left him still less since that time.
As a guest, he is a splendid acquisition, always ready to amuse and to be amused, delighting in the rapid cut-and-thrust of personal banter, and bringing out of his treasure things new and old for the amusement and the benefit of a later and less instructed generation.
This motive is glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the patter of two "knockabout comedians." Certainly there is nothing more telling in drama than a piece of "cut-and-thrust" dialogue after the fashion of the ancient "stichomythia."
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